In university courses on
philosophy and history, they refer to the Age of
Reason, the Age of Enlightenment and the philosophy of
Deism. The Age of Reason covers the 1600’s and 1700’s
A.D. and the Age of Enlightenment relates to the
1700’s and possibly early 1800’s. There is some
overlapping in time and ideas among these two eras.
But there also are distinctions between them. Deism
was a religious philosophy closely associated with
both the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason
refers to the period in European, British and American
history in which the rationalist philosophies of Rene
Descartes (1596-1650), Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716),
Bendedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) and Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) were major influences in the universities
and among the highly educated and ruling classes of
Europe, Britain and the United States.

Each of these
philosophers believed in God but their
primary emphasis was on human reason.

b)our only knowledge comes from human reason and
not from revelation from God.

c)our emphasis should be on nature and not on
God.

d)in the realm of ethics and morals, the highest
good is equated with our human understanding or reason
and humans must conform to the concept of natural law
or natural justice. In other words, what humans
decided with their human reason was right is right and
was wrong is wrong.

From these ideas
developed the non-Christian philosophies of Deism,
secular humanism and natural law ethics. Even though
the Romanticist philosophers of the late 1700’s and
early 1800’s did not support rationalism, they found
Spinoza’s teachings on ethics and nature attractive.
[2]

The rationalists not
only opposed the idea that truth can be obtained by
revelation from God through the Bible. They also
attacked the empiricist philosophy of 1700’s to 1900’s
which stated that truth is obtained only through the
experiences of the physical senses.

The Age of Enlightenment

The Age of
Enlightenment had its roots in the philosophy of
rationalism which was taught by Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz and others, but it went beyond these. Here
are some of the main features of the so-called Age of
Enlightenment[3]:

1.When discussing “What is Enlightenment?”, one
of the leaders of the Enlightenment, Kant stated that
it was the emergence of the human race from a state of
immaturity to a state of maturity. Kant described
immaturity as relying on authorities like the Bible,
the Church and the State to tell us what to think and
do. Maturity was using our own God-given reason and
understanding to decide what to think and how to act.
Kant said it was an offence to God-given human nature
to think and act as the Bible, Church or State
commands and instructs us.

2.The Enlightenment philosophers stated that
because humans possessed the wonderful God-imparted
gift of reason, there was no limit to how far the
human race could progress. The advances in
science and technology at the time seemed to confirm
this idea.

3.The leaders of the Enlightenment said that
human reason indicated there were certain natural
rights that each human has. Examples of these are
life, justice, liberty, equality, property, security
and the pursuit of happiness.

While many of these
values have a Biblical base, the followers of the
Enlightenment often defined these in ways contrary to
the Bible’s teachings. For example, their definitions
of the concepts of liberty, justice and equality
justified various types of wickedness in relation to
sex and easy divorce. Their concept of the pursuit of
happiness quickly degenerated into a worship of both
God-given pleasures and evil perverted usages of
these.

4.The philosophers of the Enlightenment taught
rightly that God did not appoint kings and queens with
the absolute right to command their subjects to do
whatever the kings or queens chose. This was an attack
on the European idea of the divine right of kings to
rule.

5.The Enlightenment philosophers did not agree
with many of the teachings of the Bible, but instead
followed the teachings of deism. Deism acknowledged
God’s existence but taught that humans should choose
their own morals, ethics and customs according to the
logic of their human reason and in accord with
the subjective concept of natural justice.

6.The philosophers of the Enlightenment
formulated various humanistic goals or ends for
society and taught that the means of achieving
these goals must be determined by human reason and not
by the Bible.

7.The Enlightenment philosophers taught their
followers to also worship modern science’s study of
nature. They also stated that the universe was like a
machine governed by natural laws which can be
discovered by human reason. They said that God had
originally created the universe and had given it the
laws of nature, but He had left it like a
machine to run itself. This why they argued that God
does not perform miracles in the natural realm. They
believed that if God performed miracles, this would
have undermined the supposedly unchangeable natural
laws He had originally determined. Another result of
such thinking was the Enlightenment philosophers
regarded the human body as a machine with
natural laws governing it which could supposedly only
be properly discovered and dealt with by male doctors.
The Enlightenment philosophers assumed males had the
superior faculties of reason and logic to females,
making males and not females suitable to be doctors.

8.One of the leaders of the Enlightenment was the
Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778 A.D.) He
was a deist and humanist. He attacked the Biblical
teaching on the Fall of Man. He believed that all
humans are born basically good, but their wickedness
is caused by the corruption of society and by
religion, especially Christianity.

Rousseau taught that
children should be educated separate from the supposed
evil influences of the church. He also said children
should be allowed to follow their own natural desires
and not be forced by teachers or parents into learning
various types of predetermined thoughts and
behaviours. He said that teachers were to
facilitate the child’s free inquiry about what was
true, right and wrong. Teachers were not to teach
children that some things were absolutely true, right
and wrong.

Like other Deists,
Rousseau taught that God exists. But he qualified this
by saying that we should test all beliefs and ethics
by our own human reason and conscience,
and not by the Bible.

Rousseau put his own
anti-Christian beliefs into practice in that each time
he got his mistress pregnant, he convinced her to
leave the babies in a type of orphanage where nearly
every resident child died.

9.Francois Voltaire (1694-1778) was another
French leader of the Enlightenment. He was a Deist.
Therefore he believed in God but rejected most of the
teachings of the Bible. He urged tolerance of all
religions except the Christian Church. His slogan
against the Church was: “Blot out the
infamous one”.

10.The Enlightenment had some good effects. For
example, it challenged the unbiblical teaching about
the supposed God-given right of kings and queens to do
whatever they wished. Such wicked teachings were the
political foundations in France and Austria up until
the French Revolution in 1789 and the 1848 revolutions
in Europe.

11.But the Enlightenment had many evil effects.
It:

a)led millions of its followers into rejecting
Jesus Christ and His teachings.

b)taught millions in Europe, Britain, the United
States and Canada to determine their ethics or morals
by the reasonings of their own human mind and/or by
what they believed their consciences were saying.
Because most people in Europe and the above nations
rejected the Bible as the source of their morals in
the 1700’s and early 1800’s, these were times of
dreadful wickedness in these places. The United States
had generally better ethical standards in the early
1700’s because of the influence of the Puritans and
other sincere Christians who colonised there in the
late 1600’s and because of the Great Awakening revival
associated with George Whitefield and Jonathon
Edwards. But by the late 1700’s, the United States had
declined greatly morally and socially.

c)laid the foundation for the French Revolution
which replaced the tyranny and evil of the dictatorial
French kings with the similar wickedness of the French
revolutionaries.

d)laid the foundation for the dictatorship of
Napoleon in France and for his constant dreadful wars
throughout Europe.

e)encouraged the spread of the cult of
Freemasonary throughout many countries. The
Freemasons’ religious philosophy fitted in well
generally with the thinking of the Enlightenment with
its emphasis on God but rejection of Jesus Christ and
many of the teachings of the Bible.

f)led to millions beginning to worship
science.

g)deceived multitudes into imagining they are
basically good people who can bring about the almost
unlimited progress of the human race in every
area. The latter philosophy experienced revivals in
times of peace in the 1800’s and 1900’s. But during
the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War and the
Second World War, this philosophy was shown to be
foolish.

Deism

Deism was a very
popular religious movement which began in England in
the mid 1600’s and spread later to Europe and North
America. Deism[4]:

1.taught that God exists and should be
worshipped.

2.claimed that true religious and ethical
teachings did not come from the Scriptures or from the
Church but instead was acquired through the use of
God-given humanreason. As a result, Deists
rejected many basic Christian Biblical teachings and
moral standards because they believed these were not
confirmed by human reason and scientific
research.

3.taught that after God created the universe, He
no longer directly intervened in its workings. As a
result, Deists said that He does not perform miracles.
On the basis of the teaching of Isaac Newton
(1642-1747) that the universe is governed by God-given
natural laws, the Deists theorised that the universe
is a machine with natural laws that even God never
changes or suspends.

4.applied the new scientific method or inductive
method
[5] of Francis Bacon
(1561-1626) to religion and morals. Previously
Christians had obtained their beliefs and morals from
the Bible and/or the proclamations of the Catholic,
Anglican or other churches and/or the logical
deductions of their human reason.
[6] But the Deists said
all beliefs and ethics must be tested by repeated
supposedly “scientific” experiments and social
research which examined whether the belief or ethics
were true. This sounded so objective but was actually
very subjective. Those doing this research often ended
up “proving” their own beliefs and ethics which suited
their own evil inner desires.

It is no co-incidence
that the spread of Deism and the associated
philosophies of rationalism and empiricism in the late
1600’s and 1700’s was accompanied by one of the
most wicked and immoral periods in the history of
Europe and Britain. It was a period in which
crime, drunkenness, sexual immorality, pornography,
stealing, the murder of newborn and little children,
immodest attitudes to exposing breasts and genitals
and a lack of concern for the poor abounded.

5.deny the Trinity, the God-given authority of
the Bible, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the
atonement of Christ on behalf of fallen humans, the
resurrection of Christ and the reality of being
born-again of the Holy Spirit.

6.taught that Christ was a good moral teacher but
not God.

7.claimed that God was gentle, loving and kind
but never would exercise vengeance in
judgment.

8.stated that the human soul was immortal and
would be rewarded or punished on the basis of good
works.

9.taught that all religions were basically the
same.

10.stated that tolerance of all religions
was a prime virtue.

11.said that it was wrong to be enthusiastic about
any religion. Lord Shaftesbury’s “Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm” written in 1708 especially spread this
idea.

12.claimed that their logic and scientific
research showed that humans are basically
good and can progress towards perfection in
all areas of living through their own natural
abilities.

13.began what is called in university circles “the
higher criticism of the Bible”.

14.co-operated with Christians in many
humanitarian projects to help needy people. The Deists
believed in doing certain types of good works and
being kind to others.

15.was taught in England by leaders like Lord
Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), Lord Shaftesbury
(1671-1713), John Toland (1670-1722) and David Hume
(1711-1776). Between about the mid-1600’s and the end
of the 1700’s, Deism dominated the ruling upper
classes in England who greatly influenced the laws
made through Parliament and the King.

16.spread to Germany through translation of Lord
Shaftesbury’s writings. German Deists were Leibnitz,
Reimarus, Lessing and Kant. Reimarus was the person
who initiated the liberal pursuit of trying to find an
historical Jesus who was supposedly not God but only a
great moral teacher.
[7]

17.spread to France through the influence of
Deists like Voltaire, Rousseau and Denis Diderot
(1713-1784).

18.spread to North America through the influence
of the Deists Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

A mixture of truth and myth

Many Americans pride
themselves on their claim that America was founded as
a Christian country. There is a strong element of
truth in this in the fact that many of the migrants
who came to North America in the 1600’s and early
1700’s, were committed Christians.

But note that by the
late 1700’s when the Unites States became an
independent self-ruling nation, its ethical standards,
laws and Constitution were based more on the teachings
of the heretical movement called Deism than on the
teachings of Jesus Christ and the Bible.

The Evangelical
Dictionary of Theology records the following about
prominent American Deists in the 1700’s:
“Among great Americans who considered themselves
deists were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and
George Washington.”
[8]

Note that Benjamin
Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were
three of the most important American politicians in
the late 1700’s who helped to establish what were the
features of the American national government, national
laws and the American Constitution.

Benjamin Franklin was
President of the American state from 1783 – the year
the British surrendered in the War of American
Independence – to 1788. In 1788, George Washington
became the first elected President of the United
States and was re-elected against his will in 1792. In
1801, Thomas Jefferson became the third President of
the United States and was re-elected in 1805. He
retired in 1809.

Note that the
Evangelical Dictionary of Theology states:
“By the end of the eighteenth century, deism had
become a dominant religious attitude among
intellectual and upper-class Americans.”[9]
Deism’s ethical or moral standards were derived from
the religious reasonings of the human mind and
not from the revealed written Word of God. Therefore,
the ethical standards which underlay the Constitution
and most of the national laws of the United States in
the late 1700’s and early 1800’s were based on the
religious reasonings of the pagan-Christian cult of
Deism mixed with a few Biblical standards.

[5]Inductive method
refers to testing and experimenting with many
specific examples in order to work out general
principles or theories about what is true.

[6]I personally do not
believe our beliefs and morals can be determined
on the basis of the decisions of church
denominations or the logical deductions of
Christians. Churches should aim to teach what the
Scriptures instruct and command.